Talk:Don't Look Back/@comment-24435238-20150826073408/@comment-3575890-20150826095344
ALL OF THIS! "But the argument I'm seeing isn't so much poor representation. But it's that PLL I reinforcing that the trans community is suffering from mental illness. But this isn't true, as any person with even the smallest bit of sense knows. And PLL has not ONCE said that CeCe being trans is due to a mental illness. '''CeCe's instability stems from being sent to a mental institute by your own family as a child. From never seeing your father for over a decade because he is ashamed of you. For only seeing your siblings, who you ADORE, once in over a decade. From experiencing your best friend kill someone, and then blame you. From being doped up on drugs for over a decade for a murder you didn't commit. From spending day and night in a hospital with people of varying mental conditions. This is what lead to CeCe's instability. Not being transgender. PLL isn't saying all transgenders are suffering from a mental illness. But mental illness due to the aforementioned factors isn't discriminatory. Transgenders aren't except from mental illness; they're human. Like I said, the direction they took was problematic in the case that trans representation is very rare. But it isn't reinforcing the notion that being transgender is a mental disorder." YES! You have hit the nail right on the head. People that are taking from this storyline that PLL is promoting this fallacious idea that being transgender is a mental disorder aren't paying close enough attention. The person being cast in the negative light is CeCe's transphobic father for not accepting her, and his lack of acceptance catalyzing her downward spiral into madness. I frankly have a different take on this. I think it says something that the writers have chosen to make the single most important character in this entire franchise transgendered. They have been very careful to elucidate that CeCe is mentally unwell as the result of a series of devastating circumstances in her life and not because she's transgendered. They are not remotely promoting the idea that there's a link between transgenderism and mental illness. If anything, they have chosen to make a transgendered character the single most complex, intricately layered character in the franchise and have utilized her character to reflect the human condition. If they wanted CeCe to be seen as a monster, they wouldn't have given her such a humanizing backstory. I think what we were actually meant to take from this storyline is that there is inherently good and bad in everyone - regardless of gender identity - that we all have our breaking points and our individualistic way of coping. But foremost, that trans people are just as human as anyone else. They are no strangers to hardship and strife. So many of them are faced with more adversity than most other people will in a lifetime. Madness is not selective nor discriminatory. Anyone can lose their mind when the impetus is strong enough. CeCe eventually succumbing to madness after being caged inside an institution for most of her life has nothing to do with her being transgendered except that it was the reason her father cast her aside and locked her up in the first place. A is such a tragic villain. The writers' decision to make her transgendered was a bold one that understandably raised some controversy, but she's emerged the first transgendered villain in television history and has broken the mould for transgendered characters. Television not only needs more transgendered characters, but in particular, more diverse roles for them. CeCe Drake is the most diverse transgendered character to meet the television screen yet.